WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird

By Peter T. Leeson

“The most interesting book I have read in years. . . . WTF?! is like Freakonomics on steroids.” —Steven D. Levitt, New York Times–bestselling coauthor of Freakonomics 
 
Did you know that “pre-owned” wives were sold at auction in nineteenth-century England? That today, in Liberia, accused criminals sometimes drink poison to determine their fate? How about the fact that, for 250 years, Italy criminally prosecuted cockroaches and crickets? Do you wonder why? Then this book is for you! 
 
Introducing us to a cast of colorful characters, economist Peter T. Leeson explains how to use economic thinking to reveal the hidden sense behind seemingly senseless human behavior—including your own. Leeson shows that far from “irrational” or “accidents of history,” humanity’s most outlandish rituals are ingenious solutions to pressing problems—developed by clever people, driven by incentives, and tailor-made for their time and place. 
 
"A fascinating tour of some of the world’s strangest customs and behaviors, led by a brilliant, funny, and eccentric tour guide dedicated to the proposition that no matter how strange it looks, there’s always a reason for it—and a lesson to be learned by discovering that reason.” —Steven E. Landsburg, author of The Armchair Economist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781503604490

Book preview

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leeson, Peter T., author.

Title: WTF?! : an economic tour of the weird / Peter T. Leeson.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Economics and Finance, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015546 (print) | LCCN 2017017380 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503604490 (e-book) | ISBN 9781503600911 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Manners and customs. | Economics. | Rational choice theory.

Classification: LCC GT95 (ebook) | LCC GT95 .L44 2017 (print) | DDC 390--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015546

Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

WTF?!

An Economic Tour of the Weird

Peter T. Leeson

STANFORD ECONOMICS AND FINANCE

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

For Stephanie, Mark, and Brenna

Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Tour Stops

Waiting in the Lobby

1. Your Favorite Acronym

2. Burn, Baby, Burn

3. FSBO: Like-New, Preowned Wife

4. Public Uses for Private Parts

5. God Damn

6. Chicken, Please; Hold the Poison

7. Jiminy Cricket’s Journey to Hell

8. Fighting Solves Everything

Comment Cards

Tour Sponsors and Supporters

Appendix (for Nerds)

Notes (for Naysayers)

Index

Waiting in the Lobby

Weird is how we describe things that don’t make sense to us—from Donald Trump’s presidential victory to modern-day witch trials in Ghana to Kim Jong-un’s haircut. Contemporary life is overflowing with weirdness. And yet historical life is weirder still. Consider human sacrifice among the Aztecs, self-immolation in eighteenth-century India, love magic in ancient Greece, cargo cults in midcentury Melanesia. On and on it goes.¹ It’s easy to get the feeling that life might be an unwitting tour of one big odditorium, that Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is everywhere you turn.

Confronted with life’s weirdness, curious people wonder, Why? I developed the tour on which you’re about to embark for just such people. Don’t you mean book? you’re wondering. No, I mean tour. You’re sitting in a museum lobby, and I’m your guide. We’ll get there in a minute. But first, let me speak to why we’re gathered here.

To honor the grandest museum of oddities, our world, I decided some years ago that I wanted to showcase the weirdest practices that human history has to offer. What better way to share my exhibits than through an interactive tour? And thus began the construction of my museum of social oddities, bound up in the pages of this book but also reaching back into the depths of time and unfolding before you as you read.

The tour has eight stops. Just beyond the velvet rope, a few pages from here, is the first. That one isn’t an exhibit; actually it’s more of a preparatory station: you’re going to encounter some strange shit in this museum, so I want to make sure that you have the tools to handle it. The other stops are par for the museum course.

First, we’ll look at trial by fire and water in medieval Europe. Next, wife selling in Industrial Revolution England. At the following stop, Gypsy superstitions. Then a brief intermission about cursing monks in eleventh-century Francia. We’ll look at oracular divination in twentieth-century Africa. Then on to the prosecution of insects and rodents in Renaissance France, Italy, and Switzerland. At our final stop, you’ll hear about judicial combat in Norman England. Now please squeeze together and make room for the incoming patrons. I hope you weren’t expecting a private tour (that would be much more expensive). You look like a lively bunch.

Turning to me, your guide: I’m an economist by training but a collector of curiosa by, well, curiosity. Upon encountering a weird social practice I wonder, Why? But behind my wonder lies an openness to the possibility—a presumption, even—that there’s a good reason for whatever it is; there’s sense in the seemingly senseless, I believe. And so I’ve found it to be in the decade I’ve been studying the specimens you’re about to encounter—and so many more.

I’ve found that people—all of them, regardless of time or place, religion or culture, wealth, poverty, or anything else—are rational. To be rational, as I see it, means simply to pursue your goals as best you can given your limitations and the limitations of your environment. In this form at least, the claim that people are rational isn’t one that most will find hard to accept. Yet the immediate and certain implication is that people don’t do senseless things.

One of this tour’s purposes is to show you that what seems like senseless behavior actually makes sense, and thus what seems like irrationality is actually rational. Weird social institutions strike you as weird because you’re unfamiliar with the constraints that the people who developed them confront. But once you step into those people’s shoes and look at their worlds through their eyes, it’s easy to see that very unconventional practices reflect the canny pursuit of very conventional goals—ones with which perfectly rational folks like yourself can commune.

If people are rational and rational people don’t do senseless things, it’s not a step much further to conclude that the weird social practices people engage in are often good for their societies; they make them better off. Practices that make people worse off aren’t likely to survive. Which brings me to this tour’s second purpose: to show you how even seemingly senseless social practices can be, and often are, socially productive.

A particular approach to analyzing human behavior—the economic approach, or what’s sometimes called rational choice theory—is the perfect tool for accomplishing these goals because it starts, as I do, from the presumption that people are rational. After we leave the lobby, I won’t explicitly discuss rational choice theory again apart from brief mentions at the tour’s first and last stops. I suspect most of you, quite reasonably, don’t care about this theory per se. What you care about is finding compelling answers to the whys that accost your mind when you encounter weird behavior. Why can’t you get full service at a gas station anywhere—except New Jersey and Oregon, where you’re forced to get it? Why is it harder to find good oranges at a grocery store in Florida than in Michigan? Why do you have to take out a second mortgage on your house if you want to shave with a halfway decent razor? And that brings me to this tour’s final purpose: to help you learn how to apply rational choice theory in your everyday life.

It can help you answer all of the questions I’ve just posed—and many more. In fact, if that theory were a physical device, it might be called the Incredible Answering Machine—not because it fields missed phone calls but because it can answer any Why? question about human behavior that life might throw at you. If rational choice theory were a physical device, it probably would’ve been hailed as one of humanity’s greatest inventions—right along with your iPhone.

I stand before you a man transformed. I started my own journey into the world of social oddities wondering why it is that for centuries, criminal justice systems decided defendants’ guilt or innocence by asking them to plunge their arms into boiling water. I ended it concluding that shaking a poisoned chicken to decide how to behave toward your neighbors can be very wise. I have the answers. So if you’re wondering Why? follow me. If you’re not, check your pulse.

1

Your Favorite Acronym

WTF?! in its fully articulated glory, is probably one of your favorite exclamations. You say it often and think it more often still.

WTF?! captures the combination of bewilderment, astonishment, and perplexity you feel when you experience something unexpected, disconcerting, and, well, weird.

You realize that sea-monkeys have no relation whatsoever to actual monkeys.

WTF?!

Mr. Peanut’s doppelganger just stole your purse.

WTF?!

Marzipan.

WTF?!

Welcome, officially, to WTF?! the economic tour of the weird that will make you say WTF?! Our museum of social oddities is stocked with human practices certain to shock and amaze. Whether you’re a gorehound or a romantic, antiquarian or modernist, saint, sinner, animal lover, or anything in between, we’ve got something just for you.

I hope you didn’t come expecting ephemera, though. Our museum houses no fleeting fripperies or frivolous flashes in the pan. The bizarre practices you’ll find exhibited here lasted for centuries—some are still in use—and were, or are, central to organizing humanity’s most important social affairs.

Remember me from the lobby? I’m Pete, your tour guide, here to help you find your way literally and figuratively through the museum. The museum itself is a bit of a maze; you can thank the zoning board for that. But I know every nook and cranny, so I’ll get you where you need to go.

As to the social practices on exhibit: they’re going to seem . . . bat-shit crazy. My goal is to help you see the sense in their seeming senselessness.

To that end, before we get started, let me give you this tool you’re going to need.

[begins distributing tiny slips of paper to the crowd]

[The patrons, looking at the slips, have puzzled looks on their faces; irritated, one of them interrupts.]

My card just says ‘Rational choice theory’ on it.

They all do. You may not have been paying attention as we gathered in the lobby. Or maybe some of you were late. But that’s your tool. With it, and a bit of assistance from me, WTF?! will morph into, That’s reasonable, before your very eyes!

[An exasperated patron blurts:]

WTF?!

Your new tool is incredibly simple to use, so simple it’s sometimes unkindly likened to a hammer by people who’ve been trained to operate unnecessarily complicated contraptions. Pay no mind to such trash talkers. They’re just jealous, and like my hammer, this tool has always worked just fine for me.

Now, let’s read the instruction manual. Please turn over your slips.

[The crowd members turn over their pieces of paper. The irritated patron from before interjects:]

Mine just says, ‘Think in terms of incentives.’

I told you it was simple to use.

Incentives are the reason you go to work on days when you’d rather stay home or the reason you’re playing hooky right now. Why you paid to get into this museum instead of sneaking in—right? And why the fine folks at the Department of Motor Vehicles take their sweet, sweet time: I’ll just take my auto registration business elsewhere! Oh, wait.

Incentives are shorthand for the relationship between benefits and costs, which attend every choice you make. The benefit of a choice you make is the value you expect to get from it. The cost is the value you expect to give up by making that choice. The larger your benefit is of making some choice relative to your cost, the stronger your incentive is to make it, so the more likely you will, and vice versa. Incentives are the reason you’re more likely to moon a stranger for $1,000 than for a nickel, forget to feed your goldfish as opposed to your son, or eat pie over poop—paleo dieters notwithstanding.

Rules—those pesky principles governing what’s permissible and what’s not, stipulating rewards or penalties for your compliance or noncompliance—affect your incentives. Rules can come from your government, employer, society, dominatrix. No matter their source, since they affect the benefits and costs of your choices, rules affect what you choose.

Suppose the government, in an effort to prevent this tour’s subversive message from getting out, began enforcing a new rule: "Anyone who takes the WTF?! tour will be summarily executed by officers of the law." The incentives affecting your choice to be here would be very different than they are right now. Unless you’re extremely enlightened, you’d see the new cost of taking this tour as larger than the benefit, so you wouldn’t. But if, in an uncharacteristic moment of good judgment, the government announced that everyone who takes this tour will be exempt from paying taxes for the next decade, the museum would become much more crowded. Different rules, different incentives, hence different choices.

Rules have a cousin: constraints. Whereas rules govern what’s permissible, constraints govern what’s possible. You’d like to buy a new Ferrari, but your net worth is $5,000; your wealth is a constraint. You’d like to make a living as a carnival barker, but you’re a mute; your physiology is a constraint. You’d like to be able to read people’s minds, but the laws of physics won’t allow it; physics, a constraint.

The benefit of these things may be enormous, but the cost is infinite. Thus, constraints also affect your choices—by placing certain ones out of your reach.

The rules we create to incentivize people to make certain choices are themselves choices. Suppose that instead of trying to prevent you from taking this tour using the rule that I mentioned before, the government tried to do so with this one: "Anyone who takes the WTF?! tour will be summarily executed by invisible fairies." How would this rule affect your choice to be here? It wouldn’t. The reason: presumably you don’t believe in invisible-fairy executioners.

The government might prefer to use this kind of rule to affect your incentives; it would certainly save the expense of hiring officers of the law to do the executing. Never mind the gore. But your belief or, rather, disbelief is a constraint that precludes the government from doing so.

What, then, can the government do? Choose an alternative kind of rule: one in which you’ll believe. It’s not as enticing as invisible fairies, but this kind of rule has the distinct advantage of actually deterring you from our delightful tour. Of course, any number of cases are possible: government may not exist (conspiracy theorists, hold on a minute), but people may believe that invisible fairies do. In such circumstances, the constraints are very different; hence, so too are the kinds of rules that are chosen to incentivize behavior. Get it?

The WTF?!-worthy practices you’re going to encounter as we make our way through the museum work the same way. They create rules that affect the benefits and costs of choices for the people who live under them, their incentives. And those rules reflect the existence of particular constraints in particular contexts. If, like detectives, we can sniff out the incentives, rules, and constraints inherent in every social practice, my dear Watsons, we’ll have seen the sense in it.

Once you get in the habit of thinking about things in this way, it’s easy. With your new tool, the remarkable, alien, and insane become mundane, familiar, and reasonable. Your bewilderment, astonishment, and perplexity become clarity, common sense, even glee.

The lessons you’ll learn dissecting the world’s weirdest practices on this tour will serve you long after you’ve walked through the exit, back into the weirdness of your everyday life.

Why does the Forest Service enlist the assistance of a cartoon bear to prevent you from committing arson? Why does American currency presumptuously declare, In God You Trust? Why does your uncle toss a coin to settle arguments with your aunt? Why does your religion have a say in your diet? And Santa Claus, of all people, why does he care whether you’re naughty or nice?

The answers to such questions are right in front of you—you just have to know how to see them. The power to do so is in the palm of your hands, so put that slip of paper in your pocket and follow me. I think you’re ready.

At the next stop, you’ll find our first exhibit. Try to stay with the group, but in case you get lost, a few directions: if you see a cycloptic dachshund, you haven’t gone far enough—turn the page again. If you see a bearded lady, you’ve gone too far—turn back a couple hundred.

You’re so quiet. Don’t be shy. Comments and questions are welcome. If you have something to say, just raise your hand. Oh, one more thing: if you’re the sensitive type, you may want to plug your ears. WTF?! is flying around in here like bugs at a BBQ.

2

Burn, Baby, Burn

I’m not exactly what you’d call a churchgoing man, though I was forced to attend Catholic mass and Sunday school growing up. My great aunt was a nun, so a march through the sacraments was mandatory too.

Despite my resistance, I had some good times with the religious part of my upbringing. There was the time I gave up going to mass for Lent (not the crowd pleaser I anticipated). And there was the time I suggested to my priest that we spice up communion by bobbing for the Body—fishing communion wafers out of a barrel of communion wine as one would bob for apples at a Halloween party (my parents got a phone call).

Less sacrilegiously, I enjoyed some of the biblical stories I heard—among my favorites, that of King Solomon. I’m sure you know this story; it’s one of the Bible’s greatest hits.

Two women come before the king disputing the maternity to a baby. Neither woman has evidence to show for her claim, and they want Solomon to decide their dispute.

Solomon proposes the following: he’ll cut the baby in half. Each woman will receive an equal share. This will be equitable, if a bit messy.

On the face of it, Solomon was a baby-hating madman. Or he was an idiot. Killing a baby and divvying up its corpse hardly seems like a reasonable response to a maternity dispute. The women who came to the king must’ve been shocked when he suggested his solution. The Bible doesn’t mention it, but I’m pretty sure both of them uttered WTF?! when Solomon presented his proposal.

You and I, on the other hand, know perfectly well what Solomon had in mind: the baby’s true mother would rather sacrifice her child’s custody than her child. Thus, the king inferred, she would turn down his proposal, allowing him to award the baby—in its entirety—to her. Which is exactly what happened. They didn’t call him Solomon the Wise for nothing.

We can learn a couple things from Solomon. First, judicial procedures that seem downright stupid may in fact be very wise. Second, when ordinary evidence is lacking, judicial officials may still be able to get to the bottom of things by creating clever rules—even ones that are based on a lie (When maternity is in doubt, cut the child in half). Clever rules manipulate people’s incentives, leading them to publicly reveal otherwise private information—information only they have about the truth—through the choices they make.

If you come over this way, you’ll see a metallic cauldron:

[The crowd shuffles down a few steps into a dim, stone-walled cellar.]

My goodness, it’s dark in here. Let me just . . .

[lights a torch dangling precariously from the wall]

Much better. As I was saying, what you see here is an ordeal cauldron. Ordeals were medieval European judicial officials’ way of deciding difficult criminal cases.

Those of you who’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail might remember a scene involving ordeals. Some villagers are trying to decide if a woman is guilty of witchcraft. Their method is to compare her weight to that of a duck. In genuine ordeals, there was no duck, but there was a cauldron like this one.

The golden age of ordeals was the ninth through thirteenth centuries, when two types of them flourished: hot and cold.¹ The former included hot water and hot iron ordeals (for Latin snobs, that’s iudicium aquae fervantis and iudicium ferri).² The latter, cold water ordeals (probatio per aquam frigidam).³

In the hot water ordeal, a priest boiled a cauldron of water into which he threw a stone or ring.⁴ The task of the proband—the ordeal taker—was, as Bishop Eberhard of Bamburg’s twelfth-century breviary instructed, to plunge his hand into the boiling water and pluck it out.⁵ Afterwards let his hand be immediately sealed up. If he’s innocent, he’ll bring forth his hand safe and unharmed from this water. But if he be guilty and presume to plunge in his hand, it will show burn injuries on inspection three days later.⁶

The hot iron ordeal was similar, but the proband carried a piece of burning iron nine paces instead.⁷ The formula for deciding guilt was the same: burn = you did it; don’t burn = you didn’t.

The cold water ordeal dispensed with the hot stuff in favor of a tepid pool. Ninth-century theologian Hincmar of Rheims described it this way: He who is to be examined by this judgment is cast into the water bound, and is drawn forth again bound. If he’s guilty and seeks to hide the truth by a lie, [he] cannot be submerged; he’ll float.⁸ If he’s innocent, he can be; he’ll sink.

Medieval law reserved ordeals for certain kinds of cases—typically those involving accusations of serious crimes, such as homicide, robbery, or arson.⁹ Punishments for failing them ranged from fines to mutilation to death.¹⁰

The law also reserved ordeals for cases that judges couldn’t confidently decide without them.¹¹ The ordeal of hot iron is not to be permitted except where the naked truth cannot otherwise be explored, twelfth-century English legislation decreed. Or as thirteenth-century German law put it, It is not right to use the ordeal in any case, unless the truth may be known in no other way.¹²

If a defendant confessed or reliable witnesses testified against him, judges would convict him straightaway, without an ordeal.¹³ This merely required criminals to spontaneously admit their guilt or to have attacked their victims in broad daylight in front of an audience.

In the unlikely event that this didn’t happen, judges would exonerate the defendant if he and a court-determined number of oath helpers swore his